Data is the new Oil, the sentence which every company is agreeing upon irrespective of the industry and country. CRM data is an asset for every company and can provide deeper and more detailed analysis which lays the foundation for your business development.
The utilization of a company’s data is a challenge from a startup company to a fortune 500 giant, as many companies don’t know what data they need to analyze and how to understand the analyzed data. The way an organization uses and learns from its data plays an important part in the overall growth of the company. No wonder bigger corporations have dedicated professionals to prepare analytic reports. For instance, being a fitness freak, I do have a steps tracker on mobile and have set up a daily target for myself, at the end of every day I would follow up on my hourly step count and analyze which hour of the day suits me best to achieve my target and will spend more time during that hour the next day.
What data in CRM are we talking about
There is a lot of data in our CRM systems. However, we don’t need to analyze all of it.
Following are some of the important and proven types of data that result in awesome analytics.
Sales Data
The information specifies how the sales happened over time and salesperson-related data.
There might be many cold calls and some hot leads done in the past week, but we might end up with a few accounts. The deal closure ratio for every month and the annual performance of a salesperson will give insights into what can be improved upon to close more deals. One example is a salesgirl can be closing more deals in winter for health insurance as opposed to a salesman in summer.
Financial Data
Monetary information of a company like an amount spent on acquiring an account, marketing cost for campaigns, logistics, and operations data is very useful for tracking the finances.
The return on investment (ROI) on every penny spent for a particular reason will provide the company with more input on where to invest the money going forward. For example, a simple LinkedIn campaign might result in more acquisitions than sponsoring an event at a conference.
Support data
The often neglected gem of data is related to the support cases handled by the customer service executives. The support is mostly focused on resolving the issues and improving the quality of products and services provided by your company. Analyzing this data often gives insights into the gaps that need to be closed and focuses on improving the standard of the products delivered and services offered by catching a potential issue before it occurs. For instance, a modem installation in a low voltage area should be informed of the tips for preventing damage to the device.
How should you analyze
- The foremost important step is to decide on what you want out of the analytics. We had seen the types of data and possible analytics around each of those. A company cannot have all the possible analytics useful, so the decision to choose the useful required analytics will help in the company’s revenue growth.
- There are a plethora of digital analytical tools available in the market. Some of them come built in with your CRM system and some need to be integrated for generating analytical reports. Salesforce CRM has its own Einstein Analytics and Tableau has easy-to-use connectors with many CRM providers.
Based on your data and requirements you might need to do a little research and see some demos on the analytic tools before choosing the best one.
- However, choosing a tool doesn’t suffice our mission, you need to have a dedicated team of professional(s) analysts to get some meaningful insights out of the analytics. The analytics tool will generate reports which have more summarized data and you wouldn’t be spending time and effort in understanding what you want as there are analysts who are experts in providing you with the best insights useful for your company’s growth.
- The last piece of it is to plan the best time to analyze your data. Several companies choose to analyze data every quarter, month, or year. Few companies do it based on the goals set and when milestones are reached.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Try using the existing tools instead of building something on your own, it’s always better not to reinvent the wheel and use the trending and leading market tools though it involves substantial costs.
- Have a watch on the competitor data but do not compare every minute detail with your company’s. Healthy competition is better but many times we compare apples to oranges.
- Archive your data instead of deleting it. As historical data always play an important role in analyzing trends and predicting the outcome accurately.
